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Episode details

Radio 4,23 Aug 2015,28 mins

Literary Landscape: The Coast

Open Book

Available for over a year

Mariella Frostrup heads to Lyme Regis to explore the literature of our coastline. She is joined by Julia Rochester author of The House at the Edge of the World, which is set in a north Devon seaside town, writer Patrick Barkham who has walked many miles of the UK's seaside paths and Bristol University's Dr Alicia Rix, to explore what has made the boundary between the land and the sea such a fertile landscape for novelists' imaginations. Writer David Vann sends a postcard to tell us why, after a lifetime on the sea, his fear of sharks still overwhelms him. While the celebrated Blake Morrison reads a poem from his recent collection Shingle Street, which captures the shifting pebbles of the Suffolk shoreline.

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